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A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.

Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature

Author: Henry Power

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: 0198723873

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 232

View: 440

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Epic into Novel looks at Henry Fielding's adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the 'Trade of . . . authoring'. Fielding was always keen to stress that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by--and wrote at length about--the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognised that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself 'as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money.' In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension in Fielding's work has gone unexplored, a tension between his commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities. This interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The 'Scriblerians'--among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope--repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding, who had idolised these writers as a young man, developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. But Fielding broke from the Swift, Gay, and Pope in creating a version of epic designed to appeal to modern consumers. Henry Power provides new readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding's major novels. He examines Fielding's engagement with various Scriblerian themes--primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalisation of scholarship, and the status of the author--and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.

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Fielding's play Pasquin (1736), subtitled A Dramatick Satire on the Times, is a famous satirical attack on pantomime, which was then in vogue on the English stage. It is one of a series of dangerously political plays that led directly to the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737. The play is set on a stage during a morning play rehearsal. The actors are actually rehearsing two plays, a comedy and a tragedy, before an overbearing director and some lookers-on.

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This is the second of three volumes of plays by Henry Fielding, whose vibrant early career in theatre has been overshadowed by his later fame as the author of novels like Tom Jones. The edition makes his plays, and his rich gift for theatrical comedy, accessible for the first time in modern form.

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New material alone could justify any attempt to supplement the Fielding of Mr Austin Dobson. Such material has now come to light, and together with reliable facts collected by previous biographers, forms the subject matter of the present volume. As these pages are concerned with Fielding the man, and not only with Fielding the most original if not the greatest of English novelists, literary criticism has been avoided; but all incidents, disclosed by hitherto unpublished documents, or found hidden in the columns of contemporary newspapers, which add to our knowledge of Fielding's personality, have been given. The new material includes records of Fielding's childhood; documents concerning his estate in Dorsetshire; the date and place, hitherto undiscovered, of that central event in his life, the death of his beloved wife, whose memorial was to be the imperishable figure of "Sophia Western"; letters, now first published, adding to our knowledge of his energies in social and legislative reform, and of the circumstances of his life; many extracts from the columns of the daily press of the period; notices, hitherto overlooked, from his contemporaries; and details from the unexplored archives of the Middlesex Records concerning his strenuous work as a London magistrate. The few letters by Fielding already known to exist have been doubled in number; and a reason for the extraordinary rarity of these letters has been found in the unfortunate destruction, many years ago, of much of his correspondence. The charm of the one intimate letter that we possess from the pen of the 'Father of the English Novel,' that written to his brother John, during the voyage to Lisbon, enhances regret at the loss of these letters. Among the contemporary prints now first reproduced that entitled the Conjurors is of special interest, as being the only sketch of Fielding, drawn during his lifetime, known to exist. Rough as it is, the characteristic figure of the man, as described by his contemporaries and drawn from memory in Hogarth's familiar plate, is perfectly apparent. The same characteristics may be distinguished in a small figure of the novelist introduced into the still earlier political cartoon, entitled the Funeral of Faction. Such in brief are the reasons for the existence of this volume. It remains to express my warmest acknowledgment of Mr Austin Dobson's unfailing counsel and assistance. My thanks are also due to Mr Ernest Fielding for permission to reproduce the miniature which appears as the frontispiece; to Mr Aubrey Court, of the House of Lords; to Mr E. S. W. Hart, for his help throughout the necessary researches among the Middlesex Records; to Mrs Deane of Gillingham; and to Mr Frederick Shum of Bath. And I am indebted to Mr Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, in regard to almost every one of the thirty-two rare prints and cartoons now reproduced.

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These essays are concerned with values and judgments in Fielding's novelsoboth those which the novels express and those to which the novelist directs the reader. Fielding scholars will find these essays stimulating, and they will be accessible as well to the undergraduate and the general reader."

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"This book throws important light on the fiction, drama, and society of eighteenth-century England, as reflected in the career of one of its greatest writers, Henry Fielding (1707-1754). It explores the range of Henry Fielding's career as one of the early masters of the English novel, the leading English playwright of his day, and an influential political journalist, magistrate, and social thinker."--BOOK JACKET.